EPA won’t face fines for polluting rivers, the private sector would

On the one hand it sort of makes sense. The government would just be paying fines to itself. On the other hand a fine taken from the budget of the EPA which then goes directly to the Treasury does seem pretty reasonable to me.

And consider if Koch Industries had done this what would have happened?

(From The Washington Times)

“Sovereign immunity. The government doesn’t fine itself,” said Thomas L. Sansonetti, former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s division of environment and natural resources.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and other lawmakers have called on the EPA to hold itself to the same standards as it would a private company in the aftermath of Wednesday’s accident, in which an EPA-led crew uncorked a 3 million-gallon spill of orange wastewater from the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado.